The Anti-social Network?

First came MSN, and with it a profusion of emoticons. Words were no longer required to express feelings, moods or infirmities.

After MSN came Bebo, with its cruel practice of ‘friend ranking’, officialising the brutal hierarchy of early adolescence. Every argument and every clandestine note passed beneath a desk became forever scripted in indelible Internet ink, assigned to the annals of Internet history.

Myspace followed. Hours were spent describing oneself with a precise balance of wit, mystery and teenage angst; selecting a song that could flawlessly narrate one’s hormone-addled inner turmoil. Blatant vanity was flaunted on bulletin boards as hoards of teenagers dredged for compliments.

The teens of Myspace moved on. University laid ahead, a mysterious place of dust-filled textbooks, academia and men with the ability to grow real facial hair. Facebook – the grown-up alternative – beckoned.

On Facebook, overexposure took a new form. Every Sunday morning, a glut of photographs would arrive, stripping their subjects of any semblance of remaining dignity. Bleary-eyed students would re-live the night, amid the wreckage of traffic cones, next-doors cats and congealed middle-eastern food littering their bedroom. Each tagged picture pieced together the hazy memories and drunken souvenirs.

Alongside the alcohol-fuelled students documenting their decline into cirrhosis (chronic liver disease), were the dreamers yearning after the angst-drenched pages of Myspace. They discovered Twitter. Each thought, each fear, each feeling could be miniaturised into 140 characters and spilled into the eternal social media soup.

It was here, in the mess of hash tags and poetic aspirations, in which the KONY2012 video arose. Origin – click! – Beleaguered celebrity – click! – Millions of followers – click! It went viral. Soon every social media-aware human on the planet was conscious to the horrific enslavement of child soldiers by Joseph Kony.

The figurehead of this movement was the suitably pretty Jason Russell. United behind him, we became willing underlings of the Invisible Children cause.One click, and we were radical, socially aware activists. The was no need to attend rallies, chain oneself to government buildings, or even stand in the pouring rain with a collecting bucket – we could all change the world simply by logging into Facebook.

The viral campaign aimed to mobilise the masses and force international action against the Lord’s Resistance Army. Activism centred on April 20th, when the Facebook fervour would spill over onto the streets, and major cities worldwide would be plastered in empathetic graffiti: Joseph Kony’s face, glaring out from every lamppost, every tree, every bare patch of wall.

April 20th came and went. In the week since, I have spotted exactly one lonely, tattered KONY2012 poster, sellotaped to a water fountain. What happened to the uproar of millions? When did our empathy become apathy?

Almost immediately as the KONY2012 campaign began to go viral, people began to question the methods and reasoning of the campaign. Queries were raised over the transparency of 'Invisible Children'. And as the status of the charity appeared increasingly dubious, the campaign began to falter.

Leading experts, including the Ugandan Prime Minister, Amaba Mbabazi, criticized the campaign’s claims. They stated that the LRA had actually deserted Uganda six years earlier, and were believed to now be operating, in a much-reduced capacity, within the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

‘Exhaustion, dehydration and malnutrition’ led to the hospitalisation of Jason Russell, after he was detained by police for running around San Diego in the nude, ranting about the Devil. The iconic poster boy was impaled upon his own double edged sword, footage of his mental breakdown spread virally across social media. His faithful media minions had turned against him.

Worldwide, the Cover The Night events passed with less of a bang, more of a gentle fizzle. Small groups of teenagers gathered on street corners, clutching their posters, undeterred by the campaigns all-but-disappearance from the social media realm. They still wanted to change the world.

Everyone else, all those who burned with conviction when they pressed the ‘share’ button on Facebook, or re-tweeted the messages of those before them, had moved on. The instant gratification of social media led to the dizzying rise and fall of the KONY2012 movement. It went viral, and for a second everyone was united. The second passed, the questions were raised, and the momentum was lost. The movement crumbled. Facebook soon returned to the world of drunken memories and cats wearing slices of bread (yes, ‘breading’ is actually a thing).

Has social media turned us into uncaring robots, with the attention span of goldfish, devoid of emotion and unable to sustain any genuine conviction? Have the years of carefully crafted eyeliner and wonky pouts offset our moral compass?

No. KONY2012 proved that people do care, but in the arena of social networking, Rome can indeed be built in a day – and it can fall just as quickly.